


forward momentum

by ratbag



Category: Let It Die (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Gore, Speculation, Third Person POV, Violence, pronoun shifts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25466344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratbag/pseuds/ratbag
Summary: Everything here is breakable, disposable. Even them and especially every body they pour themselves into.
Kudos: 2





	forward momentum

**Author's Note:**

> some thoughts after playing a few hours of ‘let it die’

_Awareness creeps in like circuitry, electric under the skin. The body is all live-wire sparks where there was silence and the train grates to a shuddering halt_.

The body - the woman - takes a step, the first in a never-ending push of _forward momentum_.

“Senpai!” A voice carries over the scrape of wheels against marble, shattering the gleaming quiet of the platform and a small, skeletal figure lurches into her personal space.

“I was waiting for you!”

A skateboard knocks against her shin, hard enough to bruise, and it, he, whatever name this bony mass claims, laughs when she doesn’t move.

She looks down at the board, at his thick-soled boots that do nothing to close the height gap between them. She’s a mountain, he’s a molehill, and he’s far _far_ too close.

She’s all muscle and flesh, _too much bare flesh_ , but there’s no skin stretched over the bleached bone of his skull - only a pair of spiralling glasses, as cartoonish as the rest of him.

 _Maybe what should have been his is folded into her_. As far as she knows they’re the only two things living (or some approximation of that) and she knows nothing about how this works.

But neither of them look like they belong here, with the polished tiles and soft twinkling lights.

There’s an aura of rot about him, sticky-sweet like old candy on an arcade floor. She can feel it behind her teeth, crawling over this new skin when he speaks.

“First time riding Line Fifteen?” He’s unnervingly chipper for a set of animated bones, voice bright like the strips of yellow cord holding his dogtooth coat shut. It drowns his frame, hides what is (or isn’t) underneath as he gestures vaguely around them.

“This is the last stop.”

He leans in closer, tip-toed and conspiratorial, and for a moment she’s caught in the endless spiral of his glasses.

“I’m Uncle Death.” He says, like it should mean something to her “And I have a feeling we’re going to get along _just fine_.”

  
  


* * *

Death keeps calling her _Senpai_ , all sugary and simpering, but he’s her guide here and he’ll talk her through the Tower because this world is upside down, inside out, guts raw and on display. Five minutes later she’s crushing a man’s skull beneath her bare foot to his whooping applause.

“ _Oh, man! I can’t wait to see your next fight!_ ”

She doesn’t know where his voice is coming from but it’s sharp and tinny inside her head. A mosquito buzz of excitement and a barely-hidden smugness that makes her blood boil beneath her grimy skin.

She has blood, she knows because it’s all over her split knuckles and leaking from the hole gored in her shoulder. It drips from the iron hammer she’d wrested from the dead man’s grip, splattered with his too. It’s the only intimacy she knows; this violence and Death’s voice in her ear.

She pushes on because there is nothing else, because she can’t remember what’s behind.

More guts, more glory, she’s dripping with it. It squelches between her bare toes as she pulls on a dead woman’s boots and wraps a thick chain around her shaking hand. The bones are broken because they grind and spark when she wiggles her fingers and pain flares like failure up her arm.

“ _You know the drill now,_ ” Death tells her and the hurting fades “ _Go get ‘em, Tiger._ ”

So she gets them. Then someone else gets her. The world explodes in a haze of red and she feels her head fracture and spray around a bullet. _Maybe next time._

  
  


* * *

_"Would you like to try again?"_

* * *

In the arcade, Death sits across the table with crosses instead of spirals over his eyes. He’d be grinning if his face allowed it, _but his mouth is already all teeth..._

They’re awake, they can’t recognise or relate to their own shape, and Death babbles on and on.

 _Why am I doing this?_ They want to ask but can’t find their tongue. _Why do I have to climb?_

They try to speak but Death leans closer and places a gloved finger over the space where their mouth should be. They feel it, the quick creeping in of consciousness from the point of contact. _They think of wires again, of spindly, tangled things; of being vessels for something else_.

“What a rush, huh?!” Death crows, drawing back, and the spark fades.

He moves with a frantic excitement now, bony hands keeping a staccato beat against the tabletop as he talks about the _game_.

“Let It Die!” He tells them. They want to ask what _It_ is.

“What do you say, Senpai?” The skeletal figure shakes with it, all manic, rattling bone “You ready for round two?”

* * *

She comes back as he; strength in place of sinew, not quite as quick but harder to break. He tests the line of his arm, feels the swell of muscle beneath his fingers, and smiles beneath the mask. _This will do_.

Brute force works well enough. Death seems to enjoy it, at least.

And death is everywhere. The skeleton whispering in his ear, the trail of bodies, and _the end_ ; the first _game over_ hits like a slap to the face (or a pike through the chest, or a chainsaw in his guts) and he, _she_ , wakes on the train again, gnashing her new unbloodied teeth.

Sometimes, they get to talk. Death’s voice is grating against the soft hum of the arcade’s ambience, the groaning AC and Meijin’s fingers tapping out combat patterns against the console. They wish their own fights could be so easy. The violence lingers, even here where they’re formless. It itches under their invisible tongue as Death talks his circles around them and coaxes them back inside.

There’s never anyone else in the Waiting Room. Just her when they’re her, or him when they’re him, and the vendors that tend to them in any form. Everything is breakable, disposable, even them and especially every body they pour themselves into. They’ve long forgotten their own shape. They can’t feel it on the outside, in the arcade, where Death watches them from across the table with growing fascination. Fixation. _Faith._ He has _faith_ in them and their endless bloody crusade and when he tells them he’s _proud_ of them all they want to ask is _why?_

It’s about reaching, they think, watching Mother Barbs play the tape again (eyes fixed on the screen as though they’ll see something new, find some missing piece) and the outlines of the Tower judder and pixelate. Reaching for the sky, reaching closer to God or maybe _godhood_ because they feel all-powerful when snapping something’s neck beneath their boot.

Death is a constant, cheering them on every time, begging for bigger, better, _bloodier..._ So they give it to him, a forever-forward push, because what else is there except the climb?


End file.
